Monday, February 20, 2012

Final Fixes

While reading this, open up our YouTube page in a new window and let some of the videos load. TONS OF UPDATES!

Today was mostly spent doing some last minute fixes on the robot before we box it up tomorrow. It's incredible to think of where the team was last year (working crazy hard, stressing, sweating, barely making it) and where we are this year (refining, finishing, working on nice but not necessary additions). Our main accomplishments today were autonomous, the new horn, chains, and movies.

We did not have school today but the team still met pretty at around 9am. We had a pot luck taco lunch which did not turn out to be much but was still nice.

Ryan worked on a bunch of different projects. The main one was that he finished the new horn. Josh (Bydlon's bro) gave the team some great ideas on how to re-make the horn so that all the pressure and tension is on supports, not the window motor. Ryan executed these plans perfectly. It looks and works great. It will also be much more resilient than the past designs. Ryan also installed a giant bolt just because (hilarious).

Colin perfected the the autonomous which is amazing and awesome. Great work and perseverance by him with some help from Megan as well. You can see evidence of it working here. When you make a basket from autonomous, it is worth 3 extra points so if we can consistently make 2 baskets, that counts as a guaranteed 12 points. Colin also made some progress on ideas for aiming better including an encoder on the shooting wheel or angle adjuster.

Jenna as usual had a laundry list of things to accomplish. She wrote a press release for the Echo Press and Cardinal Connection. She got an updated budget. She made a video of our halftime performance on Friday night. Rachel worked with her on the videos and also started doing some math calculations as practice for the Regional. Rachel used Statistics (Bydlon loved it) to estimate the probability of teams shooting 65%. These kinds of calculations will be invaluable if/when we make it to the Elimination rounds at the Regional.

Bryce was in and out of the shop early on but stayed late. He refined (added washers, haha) to the chain tensioners which helps out drive train out. Others earlier on in the day, took off the front wheels so we can put omni wheels on at the Regional.

All in all, a relaxing day spent making some final fixes to our awesome robot. Tomorrow is stop build day! WOW!